No, not tax day.
April 15th, 2011 is the release date for Atlas Shrugged, the movie.
The people behind the movie have taken on the gigantic task of finding a way to shoehorn a 1200 page book into a 2 hour movie – a book that holds the status of followers of Objectivism of approaching that of revealed knowledge.
Ayn Rand insisted that a condition of ever making her book into a movie was that John Galt’s speech must appear word for word from the book. Audio recordings of the book take about 3 hours to read the speech. That means that any kind of coherent movie that followed that requirement would have to be 5 hours in length.
So what part of the story will they tell?
The story itself, while obviously fictional, is pretty transparently told through the eyes of the Vanderbilt family. Dagny is clearly working in Grand Central Terminal and the railroad she runs is the New York Central with some fictional license turning it a national railroad extending to San Francisco.
The “behind the scenes” clip on reason.tv showed them shooting at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, located in Los Angeles, but with the obvious name connection to the Vanderbilt family. The New York Biltmore Hotel was built adjacent to Grand Central Station in the early 1900s.
At first I thought it might be the Biltmore Estates – the castle built in Western North Carolina. Biltmore Estates was built by George Washington Vanderbilt II, who was the son of William Henry Vanderbilt, who was the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Remember the three generation rule?) George Washington Vanderbilt and his wife had only one child, a daughter. That daughter had two male children – one of whom runs the Estate and the other runs the Biltmore Farms dairy business, but i digress…
I had high expectations before I read the book, but as I wrote at the time I was disappointed. It makes the case for out of control government, but stops just at the point where I wanted it to begin. If a country falls apart due to productive people giving up on it, where is the blueprint of how you create something from the ashes? John Galt lays out the concept of the importance of the individual and allowing each person to keep the fruits of their labor and operate as autonomous individuals with free choice – but how does that translate into a modern industrial society?
How people react to the movie will be very interesting. I’m certain 40% of America will think it is a movie about Martians. 5% will think it is an affront to everything that Ayn Rand stood for. The rest may enjoy the steamy sex scenes.
Looking at the trailer, this movie will be part 1 of three / that solves the issue of length. Then the John Galt speech will be part 3 – which will never be made. Ayn Rand problem solved
Atlas Shrugged was written over an extended period of time, which creates problems in the story which creates problems for the story – she started writing the book during the 1940s but didn’t publish it until 1957. The time frame of the plot feels more like the 1930s – steam trains were what rules the rails – TV and FM radio and jet plane travel didn’t exist when she started. There is one brief mention of people watching TV and she goes back and forth between railroads running on steam trains and diesel. That war was mostly over by 1957.
The time setting of the movie seems to be the present – which unravels the story. It’s hard to craft a story about a steel mill owner creating a special metal to build a new transcontinental railroad…
